Over the weekend, my wife and I watched a romantic comedy I hadn’t heard anything about (I’d had two back-to-back biz trips when it came out, my wife said): Midnight in Paris, by Woody Allen.

I’m a sucker for alternate reality stories!

Much of what I write about messes around with reality in one way or the other. And if this mechanic is well-handled and brought into a mainstream medium, all the better! I wish I could remember another one I really liked, but it was years ago and about something as similar, like people passing by in a supermarket, wondering “what-ifs,” or something. Dang it! Anyway, this is about an engaged couple who are tagging along some wealthy-cum-snobby parents on a business trip to Paris. Owen Wilson’s character, Gil, is in love with Paris and doesn’t want to leave…his fiancée, Rachel McAdams’s, Inez, not so much.

Oooh, conflict–the great must-have in all good storytelling!

If you’re at all perceptive, you can see it all coming a mile away, but that’s not the important part for me–what I loved was the whole back-in-time travel, the period and location ambiance, meeting all the Greats du History…Hemingway (“Who wants to fight!“), Gertrude Stein, Dali, the Fitzgeralds. The carrying on of two, parallel lives, and how they interacted with each other, even across time (the diary of Marion Cotillard’s character, Adriana…). I loved the mechanism of travel to the past. There’s so much I want to say about this movie, but I don’t want to give away anything else about it, including the realization Gil has at the end of the movie, obvious or not. It is such an enjoyable film, and always fun to watch Owen Wilson. But I love the “peeking behind the curtain” aspects, here, the personal epiphanies…and Woody Allen did an excellent job with its creation!

Synchronicity. The coincidental occurrence of events that seem related, but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality.

We all experience this, don’t we? Many times in our lives? Many of us might just brush it off as “coincidence” (events that occur at the same time by “accident,” but seem to have some connection)…but should we? I’m a firm believer that nothing is wasted in nature and life, nothing is “by accident.” Life is too precious and important to be chaotically accidental in any way.

Really, something as important as life is accidental?

Just happened to happen?

That might suit scientists, but not me. And I’m not going to get into all I feel is going on in the background, here, because this is the stuff of books…but I did want to focus instead on the cool occurrence of synchronicity and coincidence. How we experience events in our lives and should give them more attention. At least acknowledge them. I feel such events show the inherent interconnectedness of life. That all things are related. It actually seems to be a form of quantum entanglement, to use a more officially acceptable term:

Whatever happened to one particle would thus immediately affect the other particle, wherever in the universe it may be. Einstein called this “Spooky action at a distance.”

Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement, The Greatest Mystery In Physics.

In fact, as I wrote this, and scrolled down the page that is hyperlinked above, I literally set my eyes on FIgure 5.2, at the bottom, just as the words “a little fuzzy” came from the TV in the next room. There was an other “Mayhem” commercial on, with Mayhem sitting on a roof as a new satellite dish that then fell off the roof and onto the home owner’s car.

This is what I’m talking about. This stuff happens to me–us–all the time. In fact, as I started work on this post yesterday I found an old webpage I had years ago where I tracked a bunch of synchroncities. I’ve added back to my website. Check it out.

Perhaps it shows that there is a “river of themes” that runs throughout our lives (as I write this, a commercial for a rescue swimmer is on TV…). That there is energy in the background of our lives that attracts related events…or causes them. I don’t feel this is a useless nothing, but just one more method to show us all that we are all connected to this river. We all have our own rivers, and they cross and merge with each other. So, if this does happen…if all things are related…must that also mean that all our acts affect all other acts? In other words, everything affects everything?

What we think affects what others think? What we do (and this we do know) affects what others do?

Okay, so, maybe you’re not exactly onboard with the “what we think affects what others think,” but surely you can see the second part? That how we act out in the world affects others? That if we treat someone with respect, that might make another feel good about themselves, and how they, in turn, might behave in a more positive way than if we dismissed them or dumped on them? How if we picked up a piece of trash in our way, it bettered the world–and another might have seen this, and do the same thing themselves?

At the very least, synchronistic and coincidental events are fascinating. Even if we can’t explain them, they get us to thinking–dare I say, exercise our imagination?

So, if you take anything away from this post, take away to try to be more mindful of your day and these little instances of curious synchronicity. If anything, it might make your day a little more fun…looking for stuff peeking out from behind the curtain of life….

Question to all the ghost hunters out there: what do you do with the knowledge that you’ve found a ghost? Do you attempt to connect with it on a deeper level and get it to move on? Find out more about it? Ask deeper questions than “Are you here? Why are you here?” Maybe ask what life on the “other side” is like for it? Do you attempt to release its energy from this realm? Do you attempt to do anything else with the newly discovered knowledge, other than just “find it”?

I ask, because it seems to me there’s so much more to do with finding this kind of energy than just (and I do not mean to be “dismissive” of your occupations–I’m sure the work is fun!) stamping a site as “haunted” and moving on. I also understand the difference between a “ghost hunter” and a “medium.” And, sure, it may be great for businesses, something declared as “officially haunted,” but what about the more far-reaching implications? That if the active haunting is actively communicating, communicating back to it that it should move on, “into the light,” as it were? I understand that some hauntings are more like tapings that just replay themselves over and over, but have investigators still attempted contact even with those sightings? Asking or projecting energy back to them to get them to move on? Perhaps it’s not so much even a case, in some instances, of a “haunting,” as some people (including the investigators) simply being more sensitive to certain energies that allows them to see “ghosts”?

Admittedly, I’m no expert in this area, but these kinds of questions have always intrigued me. I believe in ghosts, but it seems to me there is so much more to learn and probe, here, about all this paranormal activity, rather than just “finding” them, as I’ve mainly seen on TV (unless TV is not showing the whole investigation). I was impressed with one ghost hunter show in particular, about a year or so ago (not sure if it was Ghost Adventures, with Zak Bagans). It dealt with “poltergeist activity,” and the host impressed me with coming up with the theory that it most likely wasn’t “angry spirits,” but chaotic and confused energy of those “experiencing” said activity. I like that kind of thinking.

Q: One of the actors who starred in The Twilight Zone‘s “Twenty-Two” found the experience particularly frightening. Who was it?

A: It wasn’t who you’d think. Most people would guess that it was Barbara Nichols, who played Liz Powell, the stressed-out dancer who’s in the hospital recovering from a breakdown. After all, she’s the one who keeps encountering that spooky nurse who emerges from the morgue and solemnly tells her, “Room for one more, honey.”

In fact, it was the nurse herself, played by Arlene Martel, who found herself most affected by the episode:

I had nightmares for about half a year after I got that part. It really scared the hell out of me. Every time Barbara Nichols would scream, I was terrified. It had an impact on me to embody that kind of alluring, enticing, negative energy, a sort of angel of death. That really affected me because of the story and…